As space is limited, registration for the seminar series will be handled on a first-come, first-served basis. As part of the signup process, you will be asked to rank your choices for each concurrent session, and these will be assigned until each seminar has reached capacity. We encourage “early bird” signup before 18 September, to improve your chances of getting a seat in your top-choice seminars. Participants will also receive a complimentary pass to the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair.

See the event page for a full schedule, seminar descriptions, and a link to the signup form.

Rare Book School Director Michael F. Suarez, S.J. has been appointed a Distinguished Presidential Fellow by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Suarez “will provide expert counsel and strategic advice for CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program and its Postdoctoral Fellowship program.”

The National Council on the Humanities is composed of twenty-six distinguished private citizens appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, with each member serving staggered six-year terms.

Applications for Rare Book School courses are considered on a rolling basis until a course has reached enrollment capacity. To be considered for the first round of admissions decisions for December courses, submit your application(s) by 1 September.

We are very pleased to announce that Ruth-Ellen St. Onge has joined the Rare Book School staff as Assistant Curator of Collections and Special Assistant to the Associate Director.

Ruth-Ellen holds a Master of Information Studies and a Ph.D. in French Studies and Book History and Print Culture from the University of Toronto. She is an active council member of the Bibliographical Society of Canada and the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture, and is the author of several published articles and reviews. For ten years, while pursuing her undergraduate and graduate studies, Ruth-Ellen worked as a research assistant in the Joseph Sablé Centre for 19th Century French Studies, a rare book library and research collection now housed within the Special Collections of the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto.

Her book-related interests include special collections librarianship; letterpress printing; and the history of publishing, illustration, and typography.

“We’re delighted to have Ruth-Ellen St. Onge join Rare Book School’s full-time staff,” said Barbara Heritage, Associate Director and Curator of Collections. “She brings to RBS valuable experience with rare books, printing, and book historical scholarship that will greatly enrich the School’s collections, as well as the RBS community.”

The staff at Rare Book School are thrilled to announce the exciting lineup for this summer’s lecture series at the University of Virginia. The lectures are free and open to the public. All talks will take place at 5:30 p.m. in the Auditorium of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (unless otherwise noted). Lectures will last 30–40 minutes with 10 minutes for Q&A, and will be followed by a reception in the RBS space on the first floor of Alderman Library (Alderman 118).

RBS is pleased to announce that the selection process for the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography is now complete: a third cohort of 20 RBS-Mellon Fellows has been chosen. The aim of the fellowship program is to reinvigorate bibliographical studies within the humanities by introducing doctoral candidates, postdocs, and junior faculty to specialized skills, methods, and professional networks for conducting advanced research with material texts. Read more about the 2015–17 fellows.

“During the past two years, Rare Book School’s Mellon Fellows have been extraordinarily active, integrating bibliographical and book-historical methods into their research and teaching, while also sharing their new understandings with colleagues via innovative academic symposia,” said RBS Director Michael F. Suarez, S.J. “We remain deeply grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for all it has done to make their achievements possible. Our third and final Mellon-supported cohort likewise shows great promise, and we much look forward to their contributions.” See the full press release.

We are very pleased to announce that audio recordings of more than 100 Book Arts Press/Rare Book School lectures from the past four decades are now available online at www.rarebookschool.org/lectures. Along with most lectures from the past several years, those now converted from the original cassette tapes include talks by Sue Allen, Nicolas Barker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, as well as:

Graham Pollard, “The Scope of Bibliography” (27 November 1973), the earliest lecture for which we have a recording

Leona Rostenberg, “The Library of Robert Hooke: A Microcosm of the Restoration Book Trade” (12 April 1982)

Edwin Wolf 2nd, “Rare Book and Research Libraries: Creating an Image” (12 July 1983), the first lecture during a summer Rare Book School session

D. F. McKenzie, “Orality, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand” (23 January 1984); “From Book to Text: Pushing Bibliography On?” (27 January 1986)

Nearly all of the annual Sol. M. and Mary Ann O’Brian Malkin Lectures

To listen, simply click the linked title (in red) of the past lecture. Additional audio will be added later this year; if you have particular requests please send them to Jeremy Dibbell at jeremy.dibbell@virginia.edu. If we have a recording of the lecture, we’ll make every effort to post it. We are also exploring other options for making these recordings available (whether through iTunes or similar services), and will have more information on that as we firm up those plans.

Rare Book School Director Michael F. Suarez’s first Lyell Lecture, “Engraved Throughout: Pine’s Horace (1733) as a Bibliographical Object,” delivered in Oxford on 28 April, is available for viewing at http://livestream.com/oxuni/lyell, or via the player below. The Lyell Lectures continue through 14 May: see the full schedule.

Twenty years after the very first RBS website, and nine years after the last large-scale redesign of the site in early 2006, we have made the leap to a WordPress platform, which will make the site much easier to update and to maintain. It also allows us to share many more photos, provides a more stable platform for video and audio files, and enables us to provide an online store for easy purchases of RBS publications and gifts.

The versions of the website from 1995 through 2014 will remain live as an archive, but please note that these will not be updated going forward.

We worked with Helium Studio from Richmond, VA on this redesign, and we are very grateful to them for their excellent work (and for their patience with us as we worked through the complex details of this transition).

Have a look around the site, and we’d very much appreciate your comments on the new site design. Please send any feedback to Jeremy Dibbell, the Director of Communications & Outreach.

Rare Book School Director Michael F. Suarez, S.J. will deliver a series of six Lyell Lectures at the University of Oxford’s Weston Library beginning on 28 April. All lectures are free and open to the public, but space is limited and advance registration is required.

Join Rare Book School and the Folger Shakespeare Library for a Manuscript Transcribathon on Wednesday, 18 March in Alderman Library 421 (the large classroom in the Scholars’ Lab). The event will begin at noon with a brown-bag lunch talk by Heather Wolfe, RBS faculty member and Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger: “Why Manuscripts Matter: An Introduction to Early Modern Manuscripts Online.”

Following the talk, until 7 p.m., participants are invited to lend a hand with one of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s new and exciting digital humanities endeavors: the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) project. Come learn about paleography and try out user-friendly software tools as you transcribe manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginners and experts are welcome: Folger staff and UVA graduate students will be on hand to assist in all aspects of creating transcriptions, and “mini-races” will be held throughout the day (there will be prizes!). Stop in to try a few words and learn about the process, or make a day of it.

Applications for Rare Book School courses are considered on a rolling basis until a course has reached enrollment capacity. To be considered for the first round of admissions decisions for fall courses, submit your application(s) by 1 July. Applications for spring and summer RBS courses are still being considered on a rolling basis; see the Course Schedule page for a full listing of 2015 courses.

RBS is pleased to announce that the selection process for the IMLS-RBS Fellowships for Early-Career Librarians is now complete: a first cohort of twenty IMLS-RBS Fellows has been chosen. This fellowship will allow young professionals to attend an RBS course and to increase their professional involvement at the national level through participation in the conference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the ALA. The aim of the program is to help fellows acquire skills relevant to professional work in special collections and build important professional networks.

We are very pleased to announce that Barbara Heritage has been appointed Rare Book School’s Associate Director & Curator of Collections.

Barbara has worked at RBS since 2002 in increasingly responsible capacities. “Over many years, Barbara Heritage’s service to Rare Book School has been exemplary,” said Director Michael F. Suarez, S.J. In December 2014, Barbara was graduated from the University of Virginia with her Ph.D. in English literature after completing her dissertation, “Brontë and the Bookmakers: Jane Eyre in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace.”

“Michael Suarez told me three years ago or so that he would promote me once I had earned my doctoral degree,” Heritage said. “Working a full-time job while pursuing a Ph.D. was very demanding; however, RBS has enriched my research and teaching at every turn. I feel very honored to be recognized by the School. My colleagues and teachers at RBS have been deeply supportive of my studies, and it’s a joy to continue working with them.”

Applications for the 2015–16 RBS-UVA Fellowships are now being accepted. Rare Book School invites students at the University of Virginia to apply for a fellowship designed to enhance research employing special collections, including written, printed, and born-digital materials.

Applications for Rare Book School courses are considered on a rolling basis until a course has reached enrollment capacity. To be considered for the first round of admissions decisions, submit your application(s) for spring and summer courses by 20 February.